mis-spellings

Rhubub, Shephards Pie and why journalists are rubbish at sums

Following my rant about the illiterate racist (see previous blog), I had a more gentle laugh at some comical mis-spellings I saw recently. A local farm shop is currently selling “rhubub” while a greasy-spoon café down the road has “Shepards Pie” among its gourmet dishes. Meanwhile, a little old lady round the corner earns some pocket money selling plants on a stall outside her house, including those popular herbs “corinder” and “basel”.

Mind you, it doesn’t pay to be too up-yourself about such things. On the LinkedIn writers’ forum there are a lot of what one contributor termed “pedants, contrarians and grammarians”, who make it their business to contradict even the most apparently well-argued remarks, citing high-brow academic sources on the subject of grammar and making the rest of us feel rather foolish and unscholarly.

Furthermore, those who have a good way with words are often rubbish when it comes to other stuff. While working as a sub-editor I’ve come across journalists who were simply incapable of understanding and correctly interpreting statistics that they’d been given. A good journalist should be aware of the various possible interpretations of statistics, because there might be a really good story hidden in the figures, but some get into such a tizz when confronted with numbers that they take the lazy option of simply parroting the interpretation put on them by the press release. Or worse, they make such a dog’s breakfast of attempting an analytical approach that they end up with a news angle that is plain inaccurate.

Some writers, for instance, don’t know how to calculate percentage increases and decreases correctly, a bit of a handicap when so many stories involve writing about changing figures – in crime, sales, trade, population or whatever. Even worse, one writer – who was supposedly an economist – was so intimidated by monthly import/export statistics he didn’t even bother trying to interpret them – he would merely provide a table of numbers and leave it to the poor sub to try and work out what the news angle was, what the figures meant.

But I’m no mathematician myself. I played in a pub darts team a long time ago and was treated like the village idiot because I couldn’t do the mental arithmetic needed to quickly work out and chalk up the current scores. I had to work it out laboriously in my notebook, by which time the game was finished and the players had retired to the bar. They probably thought that an ability to keep track of a major sporting contest was way, way more useful in everyday life than being able to spell rhubarb.

PS Apologies for the split infinitive, to any pedants, contrarians and grammarians reading.

Circumcision, mis-spellings and “imergrants” taking our jobs

Like most journalists, I love to see mis-spellings and grammatical aberrations in the public domain: it gives us the chance to get all high and mighty about the state of education today and use the immortal phrase “don’t they teach them anything?”

For this reason I’ve been enjoying a current thread in a writers’ forum on LinkedIn, where easily enraged journos like me exchange irrascible remarks about stuff like how rein/reign and alternate/alternative are mis-used, and about whether the “ess” suffix (waitress, sculptress etc) are disrespectful to women.

For some reason I can’t remember – other than that I was a willing participant – the thread strayed off into discussing circumcision (the practice rather than the spelling thereof), prompting a moderator to pop up and tell us to stay on-topic.

One of the contributors to the original debate commented that actually, wandering off into irrelevancies was part of the fun of the forum – provided the remarks were not “ad hominem”. I admit it, I had to look it up. Basically it means attacking the messenger, not the message. A lovely phrase, and one that could come in mighty useful in debates down the pub.

The forum had already added to my vocabulary in other ways, notably with the wonderful “the toothpaste’s out of the tube on this one” and its partner, “trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube”; and the simile “it’s like herding cats”, which oddly enough I heard for the first time only last weekend and jotted down for future use.

Someone on the forum has also explained to my satisfaction the correct usage of “begging the question” – a phrase I’ve always avoided using since, while I didn’t know what it meant, I did know what it didn’t mean. I need to start a debate about the correct meaning of “playing devil’s advocate”, another phrase I steer clear of using because I know it doesn’t mean what everyone, including me, thinks it does.

Anyhow, today, I was able to contribute a memorable quote from another forum which was astonishing not for its racism but more for its lack of literacy.

Someone who appeared to have had other commitments when English was being taught at whatever school he failed to attend had the effrontery to suggest (I paraphrase) that there were too many bloody foreigners coming over here and taking all our jobs.

This is what he said. “Were [sic] opressed [sic] by are [sic] goverment [sic] muslims imergrants [sic] are given the right to live in are [sic] country and treated eaqully [sic] even though there [sic] from Pakistan…”

I kid you not. Imergrants. Yes. The irony of attacking bloody foreigners while quite lacking in fluency in his own native language was probably lost on him – though I did take pains to point it out in a reply to the forum. I got equal numbers of “thumbs ups” and “thumbs downs” for my remark, so am not at all sure whether my brand of pedantry has popular appeal.

How a missing comma nearly ruined my breakfast

Following my earlier whingeing about misplaced and missing apostrophes, I’ve been getting all antsy about bad spelling.

I get a lot of press releases in my capacity as a business magazine editor and it enrages me when I realise that some stationery suppliers do not know how to spell stationery. And some manufacturers of licensed product do not know when to use ‘license’ and when to use ‘licence‘. I don’t mind ordinary people not knowing, because it can be confusing, but I do object to people who should know better being too lazy to use a dictionary.

Someone on Freecycle.com the other day was asking for ‘cloths‘ and someone else was on the lookout for ‘clothes hangars’. Maybe it’s pedantic of me to go ’eh, wot?’ and pull a face, because yes, I can work out from the context that they mean ‘clothes’ and ‘hangers‘; but why should I have to work it out? Why should I have to waste my time to accommodate someone else’s laziness? Why don’t they just say what they mean?

Every time these people spell something wrong, because they frankly can’t be arsed to spell it right, they run the risk of their message being misunderstood. They also run the risk of being laughed at, like the clueless English airman in ‘Allo ‘Allo who was described by other characters as “that idiot British officer who thinks he can speak French”.

More importantly they irritate the hell out of people like me, because it wastes my time when I have to stop and think about what is really meant.

I have every sympathy for people who have English as their second language because they are at least having a go, to the best of their ability; but it does make me cross when native English speakers, all of whom have had the benefit of at least 10 years’ free schooling, are unable to make themselves understood in their own language.

I’m a bit anal about commas too. I spent a night in a rather posh hotel recently, after an evening work function, and I was terribly excited at the prospect of getting a proper cooked breakfast in the morning. Breakfast chez moi tends to be a bit of fruit and some toast, but I’m rather partial to a nice sausage when the opportunity arises.

Eagerly perusing the breakfast menu I found myself rather baffled by the list of breakfast ingredients. “Bacon, sausages, black pudding, mushrooms,” began the list – so far so good.

Then it continued “egg fried bread”. Now, I don’t think I can be accused of pedantry by wondering what that meant. Did it mean, as I hoped, “egg, fried bread” (two ingredients I rather like)? Or did it mean “egg-fried bread” (one ingredient that I don’t)? Punctuation in a case like this is vital. I was happy enough in the end as what I got on my plate was “egg, fried bread”, but why didn’t they say so in the first place?

I also got rather grumpy about the description ‘freshly prepared juice‘: I wasn’t even quibbling about whether freshly prepared should have been hyphenated, but about the fact that they really should have used the term‘freshly opened‘. When, having tasted the muck they‘d poured me, I asked how recently it had been ‘prepared’, I was told the juice was indeed fresh – when it was put into its UHT long-life packaging back in May last year or whenever. This isn’t even a grammatical error – it’s factually misleading. Or a ‘big fat con’, as I prefer to call this mind of thing. ‘Freshly prepared’means a human being has just squeezed the juice out of a orange. It doesn’t mean they’ve just lazily opened a carton that’s been on the shelf for three months.